When the judge is a woman

Redressing the historical and structural male domination of
judicial systems requires that we consider the impact of gender on judges,
citizens, and the text of law itself. Reflections on the conversations at the ‘le
juge est une femme’ conference at the Université libre de Bruxelles.

What does it mean when the judge
is a woman? The question raised at
the Université libre de Bruxelles looks at the implications for the judicial
system – and what we consider justice – when the gendered structures and
assumptions built into it are taken apart.
In reply to the question, legal scholars and gender theory experts
explored the impact of gender on judges
themselves, as well as for citizens encountering the justice system.

For all their assertions of impartiality and fairness, the
concepts that underpin law – and frame the ways we think about justice– are laced with gendered notions, from the
evolution of the symbol of ‘Lady Justice’ from the goddess Themis to the
Enlightenment-era reworking of the relationship between citizen, state and the
law through assertions of rights of ‘man’. And judicial systems worldwide are male-dominated
in at least two senses: firstly, judges who identify as male make up the
majority of judges in national formal judicial systems, with women historically
underrepresented in the judicial profession; secondly, as feminist legal
scholars and socio-legal scholars have argued, modern justice systems emerged
out of patriarchal conceptions of justice, and as such they privilege the male
experience and qualities associated with masculinity. Gendered ideas of who constitutes the ideal
citizen pepper the historical emergence of our modern concepts of justice
throughout the Enlightenment, whilst nineteenth-century elevations of the idea
of property as a cornerstone of legal status work in tandem with historically
patriarchal ideas of property. Traces of
these ideas live
on in our current realities through their continued presence in the bloodstream
of legal bodies.

Feminist legal theorists have analysed the tension inherent
in the fact that the historically patriarchal nature of legal systems entails
the privileging of the experiences of some citizens over others –contrary to
the aims of a judicial system to treat all citizens as equal before the law. Francoise Tulkens, looking at the argument of
gender diversity as a condition of legitimacy for the international courts, led
a discussion at the le juge est une femme
conference on how feminist concern for the gendered language of international
human rights law – from the Enlightenment framing of the ‘rights of man’ – is
not mere hair-splitting or contrarism, by living heritage of inequality that
plays itself out afresh each time it is used in international legal systems as
they operate today.

Keeping the Enlightenment language of ‘man’ in international
courts contains within it the problematic assertion of who is considered the ‘ideal’
in the court’s imagination – an issue which becomes further warped by the
international nature of these courts, which in other senses entails a radical
assertion of the law’s universality.

Tulkens’ analysis goes to the
fundamentals of concepts of justice, the law, and the relationship between the
individual and a legal system. But there
are more prosaic concerns closer to home, as highlighted by the new empirical
research on the ‘gendered experience’ of the judicial system. If further evidence was needed that judicial
systems still privilege male and masculine identities and experiences,
academics from socio-legal studies to gender studies have compiled compelling
evidence from studies using a number of different methodologies to show how
systems with both common law and civil law heritages structurally advantage
men. Judith Resnik of Yale Law School
presented findings on the correlation
between the relative absence of female judges in higher courts and perceptions
of who is considered capable of deciding the most significant and complex cases
while Pascale Vielle of the Universite Catholique de Louvain presented a
comprehensive overview of the gender ratios of Belgian judges, showing the gap
between promises for a gender-diverse judiciary and the slow-moving steps of
genuine progress in this area.

In some sense, this is an
analytical exercise that can be performed of many professions: highlighting
that men are still structurally dominant within the profession, both in terms
of holding more high-level positions, in terms of their stronger informal
networks, and in terms of how workplace cultures privilege their experiences,
from gendered ‘workplace bonding’ initiatives which may alienate women to the
lack of recognition of different working-hour patterns which disproportionately
impact on those who are caring for young children. The same could be said of many other
professions, of course. But there is the
additional layer, in the case of the justice system, that it is the sphere that
deals directly with justice, and equality – surely if any part of public life
should be gender-equal, it is the justice system?

There are inherent rhetorical and substantive tensions in
making the case for diverse judiciaries (which, in many contexts, would entail
promoting more female judges, given their underrepresentation in the higher
courts). In a comparative study on the
experiences of judges in several countries including South Africa, Australia
and the United Kingdom, Laura Hilly addressed the issue of ‘experienced justice’,
the gendered experiences of judges, building a picture from analysis of
extensive interviews with judges how they perceived the impact their gender had
on their experience of judging. The
analysis highlights the tension in advocating for gender-equal justice systems –
the judges repeatedly expressed their concern with ‘identity-determinism’, or
the idea that ‘being a woman’ dictated how they would judge, given how this
idea stood at odds with their legal training that judges hold a position of
impartiality.

The unique case of
the justice system for gender equality

This discomfort expressed by the judges Hilly interviewed
highlights the significance of gender equality in the judiciary as well as the
importance of framing the issue of gender equality in ways that speak to the
unique nature of the justice system. The
best case scenario, as scholar Sally Kenney’s work highlights, is that a
gender-diverse judiciary corrects the
biased false neutrality latent in justice systems that were built under, and
reflect, patriarchal values. The
recurring question in new scholarly analysis on gender and the justice system –
‘well, what difference does it make whether the judge is a woman or a man?’ –
itself challenges the idea that judicial systems are ‘neutral’ and impartial.

For whilst it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge that earlier
bodies of law would not be considered ‘just’ by the standards of feminist legal
theory it is clear that contemporary justice systems did develop in tandem, and
intertwined with, patriarchal norms. In
other words, the concern is not that there should be more female judges so they
can judge from their standpoint of ‘femaleness’, but that a gender-equal
judiciary would neutralise the problems – for justice, for fairness and for a
society – that follow when one gender-group dominates
the system and determines what is considered to be ‘just’. Legal scholars looking at common law legal
traditions highlight the historical importance of the idea of trial by jury and
the role of non-professional judges as precedence for the idea that the justice
system must reflect society, in its plurality, if it is to be just. And achieving this plurality would, in
practice, mean taking measures to reverse the historical male dominance of the
higher echelons of the judiciary.

With feminist legal theory having built the case for the
imperative of a gender-diverse and gender-sensitive judiciary in order for the
system as a whole to be just, new empirical research addresses the task ahead
of how to undo the patriarchal privileges of justice systems. Marie-Claire Belleau and Rebecca Johnson of
the University of Laval and University of Victoria in Canada presented an
analysis of how the Canadian judiciary eventually developed more
gender-equal representation, through removing the de facto barriers in terms of
working practices and the pools from which judges were traditionally chosen in
order to mitigate against the obstacles preventing women from rising as
judges.

Similarly, Ulrike Schultz looked at ‘equal opportunities’
and women’s advancement in Germany’s judiciary as a kind of employment-sector
analysis treating the judiciary like any other bureaucracy or company. And when a judicial system is looked at in
this way, the conclusion is that more concrete measures must be taken to
mitigate against the historical disadvantages and de facto barriers to equal
opportunities that prevent women from rising fairly through the system. But the wider body of work developing on
gender and the judiciary makes a more ambitious assertion: justice
systems must be gender-equal, firstly on the basis that gender-equality and
diversity is inherently good in a public organisation, and secondly – crucially
– because the justice system, particularly, must reflect and be responsive to
all those it serves.

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